Nobel Prize recipient Dr. Terry Root ended her April 10 climate change talk at the Tin Shed Theater with an upbeat message: “We can do this! We know how. We just need to do it!”
Billed as “Climate Change is Disrupting Everything (But We Can Help Stop It),” the community education event was sponsored by Borderlands Restoration Network and attended by about 50 people.
Dr. Root began her talk with a warning that much of what she would present would be depressing, but she implored her audience to stick around for the closing message. True to her word, she went on to present a series of slides that painted a grim picture of our future if we fail to curb the amount of CO2 and equivalents we’re spewing into the atmosphere. And, she pointed out, it’s imperative that we take serious measures now to keep the earth’s average temperature from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the target included in the Paris Accords adopted in 2015.
In slide after slide, Dr. Root showed that unless we humans aggressively step up our game to address climate change, the warming globe will suffer increasingly more disastrous consequences in the coming decades, from massive species extinctions to the displacement of millions of coastline residents. Citing Greenland as a case in point, she said climate scientists have predicted a 23-foot rise in the planet’s sea level that will inevitably occur as a result of the Greenland ice mass melting.
“I’m a bird nerd,” she declared as she shared the results of scientific studies that show how global warming is pushing many avian species to higher and higher altitudes, beyond which some species will be unable to find suitable habitat.
Bringing the problem close to home, she showed that some bird species in Santa Cruz County will eventually disappear. “I have a real problem with the human species causing the extinction of other species,” she said.
Having shared a seemingly endless list of terrible consequences that will befall the planet and its inhabitants, Dr. Root turned the audience’s attention to what can, and in her view, must be done to avoid disaster.
“What we really need is a paradigm shift,” she said, “like what happened when we entered World War II. Everybody sacrificed to support the war effort and we need to do the same thing now.”
She described some simple steps everyone could take, as well as some more challenging ones. Among her strongest recommendations were to buy electric vehicles and Energy Star appliances, eat less meat, especially beef, switch to LED lighting and elect public officials at every level who will support strong measures to curb global warming.
While she currently lives in New Mexico, Dr. Root has strong connections to the Patagonia community. She is a member of Wildlife Corridors, LLC and Wildlife Haven Property Owners Association. Along with former Vice President Al Gore, she received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for her role as lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report. Highly regarded for her studies of the effects of climate change on wildlife, she is Professor Emerita at Stanford University.